thegrim000

4 hours after I posted that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39967474

For me personally, two things:

1) Just switching to the new thing because any forum of communication that's been around long enough and becomes big enough becomes corrupted and infiltrated and ruined and HN seems to be at that tipping point.

2) 50-75% of the stuff on HN now is just political/social propaganda (posts about Musk, Boeing, Taxes, Unions, Homelessness, Trump, etc etc etc) and there's no way to filter it out, I just want to read tech stuff.

What's the name for this logical fallacy? The last few months the trend has been that every single problem that affected a Boeing plane in any way, 99.9% of which are maintenance issues, are blasted far and wide all over HN, Reddit, mainstream media, everywhere, and every single one of them is taken as some condemnation of the company and their planes as a whole. Now, we get an article pointing out worrying maintenance patterns and the response is "so what? don't look at that, why do we care about maintenance issues?". Tomorrow some mechanic will forget to tighten down an engine cowling and it'll come loose in flight and the video will be front page on HN and the comments will be about how horrible Boeing is. So yes, I do care about maintenance issues and their causes.

Let's see ..

1) Throughout most of high school, college, and years after college I smoked weed. I thought it was great, it made me feel good. I'd emphasise with posts on Reddit and such about how the "evil man was keeping us down", "it's just a plant man", "it's not harming anyone", etc. etc. Now that I'm older and I look back at that time, and man what a waste. I wasted so many years just getting high and accomplishing nothing. Yeah it didn't hurt anyone else. Yeah I felt good at the time. But looking back at my life do I get any satisfaction that during those years I felt good getting high and watching a movie and eating food, rather than actually moving forwards in my life? No, no I do not. It didn't get me anything other than fleeting good feelings, it's just being a drug addict. I haven't smoked in well over a decade now and I don't miss it for a second.

2) Along the same line, and counter to multiple other posters in this thread, I spent years on the whole atheist train. I thought people who believed in religion were just morons. I saved (cringe worthy) images about how it was superior to be atheist and various logical arguments for atheism, etc. Looking back on it, it's just another social hate cult. In that cult the enemy is the religious and they spend their time and effort just pouring out hate towards them. Just another hate echo chamber. It accomplishes nothing good. The older I get the more I see that traditional religion at least (for the most part) instilled good morals in people. It built solid communities. It accomplished good things. I'm old enough to have first hand memories of what communities used to be like, before the complete obliteration of religion in the west in the last 20-30 years, and I want it back. I'd rather be around those type of people than card carrying hate-based atheists. (Of course not all atheists are hate filled, but the people that make it part of their identity usually are.)

I believe it's essentially a major filter, as it requires a certain (relatively low) level of intelligence to develop the internet / mass communication, but requires a much higher level of intelligence to actually survive it without it ripping apart your civilizations.

Is it intentional that so many people are confusing/conflating teams in India labeling data for input to a machine learning algorithm vs. teams in India watching you shop in real time? It's the former. That's how machine learning works. You need labeled training data as input. The article clearly states it's only a small minority of all customers that had to be corrected in real time by actual people.

I wonder how much they paid Tom Brady to be their spokesperson. They decided to market their EVs by just having a celebrity act cool/funny. Not by, you know, telling the customer why it's a good value, or why to choose their vehicles/service, or any positive aspects of their business. No, their strategy was to just push out commercials where Tom Brady would do something stupid/funny like have a power cable plugged into him, to promote EVs. It's so baffling to me that that is the strategy of a multi-billion dollar corporation. It's also depressing to think that it probably does work on at least some portion of the population. But apparently not nearly enough.

To put numbers to it, according to google there's a gravity strength max discrepancy of 0.7% between the places with the lowest and highest gravity on the planet. Assuming using ~17g of beans for a coffee, that comes out to an error of up to 0.12g. Seems kind of dumb to correct for 0.12 grams, in the absolute most extreme case. If they just manufacturer calibrated the machine for "average" gravity then there'd be a max of +-0.35% difference in gravity, for a maximum error of +-0.06g for a 17g brew.

This drove me crazy at previous companies where our build system dependencies were specified with wildcards so they would just auto pull in the latest version whenever you built the project. Not only are there security issues with that, as seen here, but it destroys your ability to have deterministic builds; every time you build the project it might be building against a different set of dependencies. You lose the ability to even compare builds against each other, because even though the builds are for the same exact project code, the dependency binaries might be different, and so the two builds could run differently.

The AI fever feels a lot to me like all the other fevers, most recently in particular around Bitcoin and how its proponents claimed all sorts of things: it was going to be worth millions, and all stores would switch to bitcoin and the population would conduct business with bitcoin, it would take over the finance world and replace fiat currency, etc. etc. etc.

We had a few years of that insanity where if you somehow dared to commit blasphemy and say something otherwise, even something mundane like "yeah the tech is cool and has some cool/good uses, but I don't see any of your bitcoin singularity actually happening" you'd get downvoted to oblivion no matter where you were. Now all those downvoters, years later, when their singularity never happened have somehow become quiet and disappeared and we don't hear from them anymore.

It feels exactly the same with "AI" for me. Especially reading some of the comments in here ... jeez .. yeah it's a cool tech and has lots of cool/good uses, but do I think it's going to fall into somehow inventing strong AI, a concept which we don't even have a definition for, and start taking all our thinking jobs and go into AI singularity state? No, no I do not.

I wonder if in a few years all the people writing in here about how they fear they're about to lose their job and how AI is going to take over, will also fall silent and disappear when it doesn't happen, same as the bitcoiners did. They'll just move onto the next thing I guess.

I'd rather the product not exist in the first place if their business model is unsustainable and requires them to eventually enshitify after they've lured people into using it.

You can find basically exact duplicate of stories like this from multiple years ago. Similar type of claim in the headline, similar type of article that praises some particular company that plans to deploy driverless trucks soon. The company gets some press attention, makes some money from investors, then cashes out, then in a couple more years the company no longer exists and you see another clone of this story about company Y that plans to deploy driverless trucks soon. Repeat ad nasueum. Honestly comes across as a straight up grift. I wonder if the author or publication has any stake in these companies.

I find it so insane that people think the major VPN providers aren't all completely compromised one way or the other. As if you're really going to be able to just pass your traffic through such a business and they're going to actually keep no logs, and not have secret deals made with intelligence agencies, and aren't unknowingly completely insided/compromised by intelligence agencies. As if you can just push your traffic through a major VPN and intelligence agencies would just go "well shucks, oh man, they sure got us, we'll never know who it was, foiled again".

I've seen a lot of discussion on the topic but have yet to see someone just specify which versions of xz are likely affected so that I can verify whether I'm running them or not ..

You believe that no other factor explains the difference better? The reason is "incompetent police"? Why did the US not have the same problem in the past? You would explain it as somehow, across the entire country, all police, at all levels, just become incompetent sometime in the last generation? Why don't you list some of the other countries that you believe have things figured out, and we can see what they have in common, other than "competent police"?

The most relevant point to the headline is the claim that large grocers unfairly raised prices more than they had to.

Well, if you pull up the report, it says "This study did not test whether the specific companies that received 6(b) Orders increased their prices by more or less than their input cost increases". So .. they don't actually have any data that says this, from the grocers they studied.

What they're instead going on, from the report, is looking at grocer's profit numbers (which they never provide a source for): "Specifically, food and beverage retailer revenues increased to more than 6 percent over total costs in 2021, higher than their most recent peak, in 2015, of 5.6 percent".

So .. before the pandemic they had peaks of up to 5.6% over cost, and the year after the pandemic they were at ~6% over cost (also, what does "more than" mean? Why not just write the number? They had no problem writing 5.6%, why not write 6.1% or 6.7% or whatever the number is?).

Ok? So basically the same with some minor, less than half a percent variation? Where less than half a percent of difference could be explained by a multitude of factors? Seems like the year of covid and year after covid had virtually no impact. The (slightly) more interesting figure is that in 2023 (why was no 2022 data point included, did it not fit the narrative?) the rate was ~7% over cost. But multiple years on from covid I'm not sure what the connection to covid is at that point.

Also .. isn't it extremely basics economics that when supply drops but demand stays the same or rises, this should result in higher prices? That's exactly the scenario we had in covid. If prices only rose less than half a percent more than pre-covid profit peaks, doesn't that say something extremely positive about the grocers? If they really wanted to "take advantage" of the consumer they could have raised prices to make demand drop to match the supply, for example instead of selling out of toilet paper, selling them at $100 a roll, $200 a roll. That's not remotely what happened.

Man the propaganda flies so fast, I don't know how we're going to survive the internet. Maybe instead of just shoveling the propaganda forward you could back up your wild claim with data? What are the odds of dying by flying in the current line of Boeing planes vs the odds in Airbus? Hint: It's lottery ticket odds both ways, it's the same order of magnitude both ways.

The recent Boeing situation is that there's literally lottery ticket odds of dying in a Boeing plane and it's still, by far, the safest form of travel. What point are you trying to make?

The hate and humiliation campaigns are so interesting. I've seen and read hours and hours of Loeb's commentary and he's never once made any hard claims. He proposes interesting hypotheses that could explain data, and then goes out and collects data to figure out what's actually going on. That's science. That's the scientific process. You propose the set of hypotheses that fit the available data, both the mundane and unlikely, collect more data, and rule out hypotheses that don't fit the new data, and whiddle it down.

Anybody that thinks he's made hard claims are mostly just suckered in by trash pop sci articles that spins what he says into ridiculous headlines/articles like "Loeb says there's UFOs on the ocean floor!" to get clicks.

Ironically, the very article that was linked here makes unscientific hard claims: "The seismology data used to locate this meteorite wasn’t due to an impact, but merely a truck passing near the seismic station". That's a hard claim. There's no "we think the most likely explanation is X" or "the data is better explained by X theory". The paper the article links to as "proof" also makes no hard claims but merely says that they think the data "suggests" a traffic based origin better explains the data. The article itself is the definition of unscientific and everything they're trying to pin on Loeb.

[Edit] The paper which claims the traffic-based origin also has a grammar mistake in the very first paragraph, so I'm not very enthused about reading further and seeing how methodical their methods were, when they couldn't even manage to write a one paragraph summary without error.

The "study" the article is based on is pretty laughable. It's nearly 100 pages of nothing but corpo-DEI-jargon. They never actually include any of the data that they're analyzing, they conveniently just "summarize" what we should think about the data. The few graphs that are included don't label all or any of the axes. Nearly 100 pages and no hard data. There's nothing scientific about this, it's just typical social propaganda / class warfare propaganda.

The article is kind of all over the place. Let's see ..

- It says one of the reasons is that people (Trump) threatened to "open up libel laws". Which, didn't happen, but even if it did .. they "lost their nerve" because someone threatened that they'll actually be liable if they lie? Maybe if they didn't constantly lie they wouldn't have to worry about consequences for lying?

- It makes vague claims about how the news fears to say bad things about people/companies because they'll pull their support .. as if that wasn't always a thing? How about if they just do fair, impartial journalism, rather than biased political hit pieces? Then people wouldn't get so outraged and pull out of your platform?

- I like how it swaps around cause and effect. It argues that lawyers suing media organizations have become more common, and so they've "lost their nerve" as an effect. No ... it's the other way around .. media organizations becoming absolute trash, biased, profit seeking, propaganda peddlers have resulted in them being sued more often.

Ah yes, a white collar CEO at a private US company just decided one day that his company was going to start committing felonies and sending swarms of drones to accost a US military installation. And the CEO ordered everyone involved to be somehow threatened into complete silence about the operation. That's totally something that would happen in the real world and not a deranged conspiracy theory.

I was curious whether that was a real percentage or a rough guess percentage, so I looked it up:

From https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2020-2021/ODMort.pdf , all opioid deaths of children <= 15 years old averages about .1 per 100,000 per year, so the actual number is 0.0001%, or 5 times lower.

Oh man I was so confused when I couldn't solve level 2. I even double checked the instructions that there was no rotate key. I'm on a laptop with a nub for a mouse and I'm spamming various keys to try to figure out how to get a piece to rotate and I haven't been successful.

I can also select a piece and hit space and it grows in size and goes outside of its box for some reason? Is that relevant to solving puzzles? Or a bug? I guess I won't find out since I can't rotate pieces to progress further ....

This is a topic I really just don't understand. I've seen dozens and dozens of articles about it in the last couple of years. The only two possibilities I see are either

1) people actually care about this issue, an issue which I've never in my life given one picogram of thought about, it doesn't affect me in the slightest - twice a year we adjust the clocks by an hour, how does this actually bother a significant chunk of people enough to be upset over it?

or 2) the articles are some sort of long-running propaganda campaign pushing the idea for some reason, but I can't for the life of me figure out what they'd gain from it. Is there some sort of political/social power to be gained from getting rid of daylight saving time? Maybe just another "us vs them" divisive issue? I just can't understand it.

If you forcefully confiscated every single penny of net worth every single billionaire citizen has, every single last penny, and distributed it across the population, it would amount to a one time payment of something like 2,000 to everyone else. Simply pushing your "just tax the rich" line just doesn't remotely match up with reality. It requires an elementary level of math to see that taxing the rich more will not fund UBI. (And ignores all the negative consequences of doing so).

So am I crazy in noticing all of these "X psychedelic great for anxiety/depression/Y" stories over the last couple of years and wondering if it's natural or else why there's a propaganda campaign pushing this idea out now? The internet is ruined for me now, I now just assume by default that it's likely coordinated, not natural, and there's some overall political/social angle they're trying to achieve. Probably working to soften up the population for legalization efforts in a few years? The weed pattern - spend a few years pushing studies that weed helps cure/treat X/Y/Z disease, which led after enough years to medicinal weed, which led after enough years to legalization.

There's probably 1000 major aviation incidents each year, every year, for many decades. We're submitting Hacker News articles on every one now? Why? We never did before.

Well the very first item in the list is wrong so I stopped reading there. Have your interface between systems be pure abstract virtual classes so that changing private members in a concrete subclass doesn't propagate the change to the consumers.

You can just download the software from their site as an archive with pre-built executables in it and it works just fine on Ubuntu.